Frederick the Second

by Ernst Kantorowicz

  Frederick took his stand on this commonwealth of western kings, and strove to bind them together into a royal corporation. An insult to the Emperor was an insult to his fellow-monarchs. “Hasten with water to your homes when fire flames in your neighbour’s house… fear the same danger in your own affairs. The humiliation of other kings and princes will be a little thing, if the power of the Roman Caesar whose shield bears the brunt of the first onslaught should crumble under perpetual attack. … We conjure you, nobles and princes of the earth, and cry you the alarm, not because our own weapons are unavailing to ward off such shame, but that the whole world may know that the honour of all is touched when insult is offered to any one of the guild of secular princes.”

  As Germany had her “Illustrious Body of the Holy Empire” Frederick saw the ideal Imperium as a corpus saecularium principum under the leadership of the Emperor—a Corpus which he was the first to call to life. He thus set himself to awaken the non-ecclesiastical but spiritual instincts of the west and (as he had done on a smaller scale in Sicily) to marshal them as one universal whole against the Church. Again and again he utters his warning cry, “the affairs of the secular power should not be subordinated to the Church,” and explains that that is why he prevents the papal Council which was intended to decide the Lombard question. His theory that with the fall of the Emperor, the head of all, the whole world would fall, was quite in tune with the mental atmosphere of the time. “They begin with us, but be assured of this they will end with the other princes and kings whose might they will no longer fear when once we are overcome. Defend therefore your own rights in defending ours.” He summons the kings to vigorous resistance, for the Pope is bent on subduing to himself all the dominions of the faithful.

  Such exhortation was by no means unjustified. Pope Gregory’s successor, Innocent IV, met with some resistance in France, Aragon and England, and is said, “with rollings of the eyes and curlings of the nostril,” to have thus addressed the messengers of England. “It is better for us to make a treaty with your prince to crush these recalcitrant kinglets. When once we have quelled or destroyed the great Dragon the petty snakes will easily be trodden under foot.”

  The world feared some such treatment by the Pope if the mighty Emperor Frederick were once laid low. The Curia would boast: “We have trampled on the great Frederick, and who then art thou that thou dare hope to resist us?” If the Pope acted thus the fault lay with the kings themselves and with them alone. The Emperor’s words are menacing: “Neither the first are we, nor yet the last, whom priestly power opposes and seeks to hurl from the seats of the mighty. And the fault is yours who give ear to these hypocrites of holiness whose arrogance would fain believe that into their gullet all the Jordan floweth.” What the Emperor perceived as the gravest danger, threatened not indeed by the Church but by the new hierarchy, was the sacrifice of original loyalties made by the Roman priest. He writes in wrath to one of the kings: “These who call themselves priests now turn oppressors, grown fat upon the alms of the fathers and of the sons. Although they be themselves the sons of our loyal subjects, yet do they render no reverence to Emperor nor king when once they are ordained as apostolic fathers.” Napoleon felt the same bitterness.

  Frederick II was the first to feel the fact acutely and express it freely. With diabolic ingenuity he turned the tables and challenged the whole conception of spiritual authority. He wrote to the Christian kings that he considered it base of the Pope to hinder him, the Emperor, from marching into Lombardy, the historic inheritance of the house of Hohenstaufen. Especially base since the Pope had claimed his imperial help against the Romans, who owed no allegiance to Gregory’s father, nor to his grandfather, nor to his kin. One argument of Frederick’s in particular carried great weight with the national nobility of England and of France. A movement of the French barons against the clergy adopted bodily the Emperor’s ideas, and rebelled particularly against the fact that priests “aforetime the sons of slaves presume according to canonical precept to judge free men and the sons of free men.” They demanded that all jurisdiction should be withdrawn from the priests in favour of the king.

  Although Frederick II never ceased to emphasise the community of Emperor and kings, he did not fail in his letters duly to stress the unique and eminent position of the Roman monarch and the comprehensiveness of the Empire. What was an individual king beside an Emperor! A pitiful figure, standing alone, surrounded by danger on all sides. “Ye single kings of single countries what have ye not to fear from such a High Priest who dares to depose us…, us, whom God hath singled out by the imperial diadem, us who mightily hold sway over illustrious dominions.” The exalted character of the Imperium is again expressed not less haughtily and clearly. An English or French bishop who crowns and anoints his king has thereby acquired no right to depose his king. No greater right has the Pope to dethrone the Roman Caesar whom he has anointed and crowned. This sentence sets clearly forth the difference in status between king and Emperor. Frederick was fond of describing himself as “geographically nearer in space and in office more akin” to the Pope than to his fellow-monarchs.

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  What was the reaction of the western kings to these theories of the Emperor? Though Frederick reiterated his absence of envy towards the kings they did not wholly trust him. In England it was considered not impossible that Frederick might cross the narrow Channel to avenge himself if England resisted his request and continued her payments to the papal overlord. In spite of assurances of friendship the King of France was prepared at any moment to leap to arms to defend his frontiers. Not till the very last did they consider themselves wholly safe from possible conquest. Nevertheless, a feeling of fellowship with the Emperor was strong, as was shown at the outset of the Lombard War when the kings intervened with the Pope on the Emperor’s behalf, and two years later actually sent auxiliaries for the campaign against Brescia. On the other hand the idea of a league of secular monarchs against the Church awakened little direct response. No active common resistance to the Pope was organised, though in all countries the aristocracy sympathised with the Emperor. None of the kings was anxious wantonly to attack the Church, though each was engaged with her in open or in secret strife. It was, however, an extraordinary triumph of imperial policy that none of the kings allowed himself to be seduced into alliance with the Pope, none of them stabbed the Emperor in the back, and none recognised his excommunication or deposition. Passively the solidarity of the kings was perfect.

  Any sign of partisanship for one side or the other was made impossible in France by the strict, unerring uprightness of King Louis IX, known as St. Louis. He was by far the most important royal contemporary of Frederick II, and one of the noblest figures in the roll of the kings of France. His reverence and simple humility made him a saint, but with these he combined all the knightly pride of a Western Frank, and that genuine royalty of kingship which left its impress so deeply on the land of France, down to the days of le Roi Soleil. Germany was the land of Emperors, and France was the cradle of kings. The Valois and the Bourbons may well have outshone St. Louis in royal pomp; as little more than a boy he had forsaken all outward show. He was second to none, however, in royal pride; and in royal sincerity he outshines most of his successors. As founder of the Law-State of France he seems to have learnt more from Frederick II than is generally recognised, and he had the clear eye of a great man for the problems of Christendom whose confusions frequently distressed him. As he lay at nights on his plank bed pondering eternity he never lost sight of the universal meaning of the western powers, he was never seduced by expediencies, he never forgot what the honour of his country demanded.

  The importance of St. Louis lies in this: that at a time when Christian chivalry was beginning to crumble and peter out in the petty and the commonplace, this Frankish king set her to new and universal tasks, inflamed the torpid for the last great Crusade with the same fire and enthusiasm as he brought to conquer his own bodily weakness, which was never allowed to dete
r him from midnight prayers or matins. The world saw in him something of the spirit of the early Templars: a combination of pride, humility and joy in work, transfigured by the same faith. A generation later this Order was abolished; its degeneration had caused him bitter sorrow. The last symbol of its greatness perished with St. Louis off the Tunisian coast.

  On a royal plane St. Louis had the same significance for Frederick that the German Grand Master, Hermann of Salza, had had on the more modest stage of earlier days. As all-Christian King, Louis IX was the God-given peacemaker between two warring powers, Empire and Papacy; for a decade he strove indefatigably to fulfil his task. His failure brought him grief, for his dream of freeing again the Holy Land was shipwrecked on the arrogant obstinacy of the Curia. Yet with strict impartiality he rendered unto the Pope the things that were the Pope’s and unto Caesar the things that were Caesar’s. He permitted the proclamation in France of Frederick’s excommunication, but forbade all armed assistance for the Pope, and he threatened to confiscate the goods of the Church when he found his clergy raising money in France for the war against Frederick. The French prelates who were setting out to attend the Pope’s Council seem to have been forbidden to undertake anything against Frederick II, even if Gregory should demand it. On the other hand he wrathfully resented the Emperor’s retention of French clerics in his prisons. “The kingdom of the Franks is not so weak that it is wise to goad it with the spur,” thus he writes to Frederick. As confidant of both parties he was ready to fly to arms against either, if either sought to lure him from his neutrality. He succeeded in preventing a decisive predominance of either Pope or Emperor.

  Beside King Louis the other kings make a poor showing. King Henry III of England is, in comparison, characterless and poor-spirited. He was a puppet, unable to hold his own with Emperor, Pope or peers. Beyond other kings he had ties to each of these powers: the Emperor was his brother-in-law, the Pope his feudal overlord, and the peers took their stand on Magna Charta. Cowardly and undecided, Henry agreed with whoever at the moment happened to be his interlocutor. His phrase “I do not wish to contradict the Pope in anything: I dare not,” might mutatis mutandis equally apply to Emperor or barons. On occasion he gave in to the Emperor when Frederick, supported by the peers and their spokesman Richard of Cornwall, demanded that he should refuse the papal tribute. For Henry III, to the indignation of many of his subjects, had permitted the Pope to raise money levies, and had allowed the country to be mercilessly exploited, besides thus supplying the Pope with money for his war and indirectly injuring the Emperor. Under pressure from Frederick and the barons he defied the Curia for a little while. Henry of England and Sancho II of Portugal, whom the Pope had deposed, supplied the Emperor with two classic instances of the way in which Roman priests sought to suppress the secular royal power. He constantly pointed out to the other kings how dearly England paid for her subjection to the priest.

  The corpus saecularium principum under the Emperor’s leadership was entirely a creation of Frederick II’s, and a completely new way of conceiving the world as a sort of corporate State. The conditions precedent for this were a very considerable independence of the individual kings on the one hand, and on the other the emancipation of the secular state from the Church, an emancipation which had everywhere begun to set in. By striving to kindle this corporate spirit in the kings, which was everywhere in evidence in Europe, Frederick was taking the only line by which the maintenance of a world monarchy was possible. When we dream to-day that we have approached nearer to a community of equal nations, such as Frederick II and Dante had in mind, let us not forget that the bond that then united them was the dignity and nobility and supremacy of the worthiest among them.

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  Amongst the elements which the western monarchs had in common, their royalty, their intellect, their secularity, Frederick laid stress on another common tie, valid until very recent times: their common blood. This was another bond which Frederick valued highly, the more because it lay outside the Church. Frederick liked to boast that he was connected by descent or by marriage with almost all the royal houses of Europe. Hohenstaufen blood was almost synonymous with imperial blood. People had ceased to look for the scion of another house fitted to wear the imperial diadem. For Frederick was, in fact, the fifth of his family to reign as Emperor in this elective kingdom, and the succession of Conrad, his son, the sixth, was well assured.

  Frederick, therefore, treated the royal houses of Europe as one great princely family, within whose circle, however, the Hohenstaufen was the imperial branch, the “Empire breed” as Manfred called it. A special virtue resided in the race, and to their offspring it was given “to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God… but to the others only in parables.” “What German, what Spaniard, what Englishman, what Frenchman, what Provençal, what man of whatever nation or tongue, could, without our will rule over thee, O Rome, or to thy glory exercise the imperial office? The inexorable necessity of the Universe replies: None, save the son of the greatest Caesar whose gifts, inborn in his imperial blood, ensure him force and fortune.”

  These words of Manfred’s clearly indicate the new line of thought that Frederick had initiated. The Hohenstaufens rule the world not as the old Germanic, Frankish, royal stock—what weight could that carry in England or France, in Spain or Hungary? In the person of Frederick II the regia stirps of the Waiblings had become the stirps caesarea, the imperial race of Rome! The divine stock of the Roman Caesars appears once more in the Hohenstaufen, “the heaven-born race of the God Augustus, whose star is unquenched for ever,” a race which springs from Aeneas, the father of the Roman people, and descends through Caesar to Frederick and his offspring in direct descent. All members of this imperial race are called divine. The predecessors on the imperial throne are divi and the living no less, finally all members of the Hohenstaufen family. By a coincidence King Conrad from the very day of Cortenuova drew up his documents as “Conrad, son of the divine Frederick, the exalted Emperor, chosen by God’s Grace King of the Romans,” whereas before he had styled himself simply, “Conrad, son of the glorious and exalted Frederick.” Frederick’s own letter to Jesi, his reference to the divine imperial mother in Bethlehem of the March had an almost embarrassingly definite ring about it, and he addressed his son Conrad as a “divine scion of the imperial blood.” Decades after Frederick’s death the Margrave of Meissen, who had married the Hohenstaufen princess, Margaret, Frederick’s daughter, was flattered as the “father of divine children.” Even at the end of the century a daughter of Ottocar II of Bohemia was celebrated as “an offshoot of the divine blood” whom fortunate Bohemia had begotten, because Ottocar’s mother had been a daughter of Philip of Swabia, and another great grandmother had been “of the race of the Roman Gods.” So deeply rooted was this deification of the Hohenstaufens in Italy that Boccaccio, arch-Guelf that he was, lodged a protest against the prevailing assumption that the imperial Hohenstaufen race was the noblest that ever breathed. The “blood of Barbarians,” he contended, could never exceed in worth the matter which Nature had used to shape the Italian!

  The imperial office had been held divine by Barbarossa; now gradually not only Frederick’s person but the Hohenstaufen race and the Hohenstaufen blood was Caesarean and divine. Yet one half-century of Staufen rule, the longed-for THIRD FREDERICK whom the Sibyls had foretold, and the West would have seen the God Augustus marching in the flesh through the gates of Rome, would have burnt incense on his altars and offered sacrifice. In the Hohenstaufens the son of God had appeared for the last time on earth.

  The Roman Curia was right that she dare neither slumber nor sleep till this accursed race had been exterminated down to the last bastard of the second and third generation. For the Church recognised the Staufen as a race apart in whom a mysterious intangible power resided, a race of priest-haters and priest-persecutors, a house on whom the Church’s ban rested for all time. Each separate member was equally accursed, not for his personal guilt but for the crime of belo
nging to the “tribe of the ungodly”! “Destroy ye name and fame, body and soul, seed and sapling of the Babylonian!” was for decades the battlecry of the vengeful, hate-haunted priesthood of the Church of Christ. For the first time since ancient days a curse was to overshadow a whole house, cruel, unrelenting, terrible, executed by the priests of a wronged and jealous God. The priests had no alternative. They were faced by the hubris of a race, growing from generation to generation more youthful and more beautiful, approaching near and nearer to God and to the Gods.